Online debating sites are hip right now; probably because it is a presidential election year. It isn’t obvious how these sites plan to make money and survive. Several online debating sites have already come and gone and several more will surely join them in the deadpool in the next year.

Mashable recently did a write-up of a dozen sites for political debate. They even mentioned two academic debate sites, debate-central.org and idebate.org, but alas there was no love for PFDebate.

Today Mashable has a write-up about another debate site: UberSpat. What seems to make UberSpat different from other debate sites is that it allows you to provide (link to) evidence to support your argument. It also allows readers to rate the quality of the evidence.

People with an academic debate background will like the evidence links. My biggest complaint about the evidence links is that you can’t just mouse over the link to see the URL because all of the links appear as Uberspat links. However, when you click on the links, they go to the original source. This may not be a big deal to some people, but if I am interested in a topic, I probably have already done some reading and I am only interested in following links to articles I have not read.

I don’t think any of the online debating sites have managed to capture the academic, on-point refutation model of debate, but each new wave of debating sites gets a little closer.